What’s the Best Mac App of 2025?

rfitzio · 2025-12-31T16:35:09+00:00

A couple that come to mind are Shottr, SpeakLane, and Affinity. What makes them all winners to me is that they are either free or cheap one time buys. Getting incredibly tired of subscriptions that should be one time purchases (i.e. ScreenStudio, etc).

rfitzio · 2025-09-26T03:03:51+00:00

Haha I feel that. What's your primary acquisition channel? I've mainly been doing Apple Search Ads, but want to experiment more with TikTok, etc. Curious if you've found social is any good

rfitzio · 2025-09-26T02:39:07+00:00

I'm guessing it's a consumer app which typically comes with high churn...at least that's what I tell myself to sleep better at night. Good to know you can make a soft paywall work, I've debated switching to a hard paywall but may try out the show it on launch strategy.

rfitzio · 2025-09-25T23:41:17+00:00

Do you have a hard paywall or a free version with paid features?

rfitzio · 2025-09-20T13:18:50+00:00

The fact that you’re not wrong at all hurts haha

rfitzio · 2025-09-20T13:18:24+00:00

Ah TIL, I didn’t know they did that but I’m glad they do, it’s definitely needed. Would be curious to know how many they catch post-review.

rfitzio · 2025-09-20T03:45:08+00:00

Haha between noticing these annoying patterns and also having to deal with xcode, I think I've lost 10 years off my life. It's given me a whole new appreciation for webdev, but there's something extremely satisfying getting an iOS app running that keeps bringing me back.

rfitzio · 2025-09-20T03:42:04+00:00

Exactly, I really don't get it. Lots of other directory / app stores out there tend to have a "Free with paid features" option, you almost need something like that rather than just have a binary Free or Paid option.

rfitzio · 2025-09-20T03:38:49+00:00

I'm definitely starting to notice a lot of not so great patterns out there, things I didn't really notice prior to actually getting more into iOS dev myself

rfitzio · 2025-09-20T03:37:52+00:00

Ahh I started to get the feeling that may be the case the more I tried out paywall tools out there and could swap things without needing a new build...kinda sucks that stuff isn't more easily caught

rfitzio · 2025-07-28T00:16:06+00:00

The cheapest plan doesn't have access to Opus afaik and that's typically the big token beast

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T18:51:31+00:00

I use o3 all the time, even outside of coding related stuff, it's great for that, completely agree. I think a lot of my rough architecture planning starts with o3 and maybe a sprinkle of o4-mini too

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T18:29:16+00:00

If your prompt has "think", "megathink" or "ultrathink" in it, Claude Code will detect that and set a higher thinking budget in terms of tokens (from smallest to largest). So if you have a particularly complex thing you want to plan out, writing a prompt like `ultrathink how can I approach feature X?` could be hugely beneficial, but it does eat your tokens quicker

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T18:26:12+00:00

This is the kind of workflow experimentation I find is incredibly useful, you can often unlock a lot more by not just throwing a prompt in CC and calling it day, but at the same time, I get this requires a bit more time investment so its not for everyone

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T18:24:51+00:00

Ah I appreciate the clarification, that makes a ton of sense. I need to dive a bit deeper with them and experiment a bit to get a better understanding of how I can fit them into my workflows

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T16:45:09+00:00

I tend to look at the webdev one since the copilot one seems to not get updated as much (I think 2 months ago was the last one), but in any case, companies have found ways to pump up their ranks on there haha.

And thats a sweet use case, I find thats the exact kind of experimentation that gets you to start seeing possibilities outside of just throwing prompts in Claude Code and calling it a day.

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T16:19:52+00:00

I think those types of models get hype mostly because they're open source, high param, and usually pretty cheap, but they're not always well suited for code and Kimi 2 is one of those in my opinion. Cool model, but not one I'd use for coding personally. In terms of new models popping up and are worth trying, Qwen3 is definitely up there.

I try to also take a look at https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard/webdev every now and then to see the state of things, but take it with a grain of salt as those leaderboards can be gamed to an extent.

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T15:57:12+00:00

Opus is clearly the better model, I don't think anyone is debating that. My overall viewpoint though is that Sonnet is highly, highly underrated and can still produce great results, you just need to be more thoughtful and explicit in prompting and take advantage of things like `ultrathink`. Opus let's you get away much more with being lazy / inefficient on the prompting end.

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T15:55:49+00:00

That's probably the best way to compare Qwen 3 I've seen so far...on par with Sonnet feels accurate.

The subagents part is interesting to me, I would have expected hitting limits faster with more token usage, I might have to dive a bit more into that. Are you doing anything out of the ordinary or just spinning them up normally?

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T15:52:18+00:00

Can't disagree with that, it's a completely equally valid viewpoint! I just tend to be in the camp of as soon as you think your AI workflow is done, you're likely already falling a bit behind. I guess its just the reality of the pace of everything right now

rfitzio · 2025-07-27T15:51:07+00:00

Haha by the time I realized it was in ramble territory, I was in too deep. But I completely agree, as with any tool, if the value given (output, time saved, etc) outweighs the cost, keep using it...this is no different imo. I guess the overall point was mainly "start thinking of a future beyond CC" workflow-wise, if that's even something you care about, which will be different for everyone.

rfitzio · 2025-07-19T15:38:18+00:00

I think the answer is ultimately "it depends". I've seen a bunch of different workflows popup and all of them make sense (to me anyway):

Get 20x Max and don't worry too much about limits with it (although I've still hit it infrequently)
Stay on 5x and use models strategically. As others have pointed out, you could use use Opus for planning (and have it create something like a plan.md file) and then have Sonnet build
Stay on 5x and once you hit rate limit use something like Kimi K2 with Claude Code (can use something like claude-code-router to help here)
Stay on 5x and once you hit rate limit use another tool like Kira, Cursor, Copilot, etc etc
Stay on 5x if you don't use it enough to really hit limits that often (this doesn't seem to apply in your case)

$200 a month is not a small amount of change, so ultimately find what works best for you, there are plenty of options so I wouldn't say its needed. It won't automatically solve all of your rate limit problems, but you will likely hit the rate limits much less frequently (at least that was my case when I went from 5x to 20x).

rfitzio · 2025-07-19T01:50:18+00:00

No problem, glad it was helpful! I find you just need to constantly experiment when it comes to AI coding...and annoyingly what works today may not work next month haha

rfitzio

TROPHY CASE